Brave Tsavo, the first African lion hound, never dies. A nature god blesses him with reincarnation, and he lives again and again as an angel of mercy for the people he loves. Follow his heroic journey from the Dark Continent to the 9/11 disaster site and the Battle of Gettysburg. Watch him outwit a famous psychiatrist and cross the genetic line between man and animal to heal his old master's broken heart. Magical realism makes anything possible in these unusual, irresistible stories.

Michael Hofmann, a much-praised contributor to Poetry Introduction 5, was born in Germany in 1957 but brought up in Britain. Nights in the Iron Hotel, which won the author a Cholmondeley Award in 1984, is his first full-length volume. Hofmann's poems are marked by a classical authority, a formidable ironic intelligence, wide-ranging subject matter and a unique tone of voice. 'You move the fifty-seven muscles it takes to smile,'Hofmann writes in a poem whose subjec...

Robert Frost and Edward Thomas met in a bookshop in London in 1913. During the next four years, the two writers—Frost, an unknown poet who had sold his farm in New Hampshire in order to take his family to England for one last gamble on poetry and Thomas, a sad literary journalist—formed the most important friendship between poets since that of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Their friendship only ended with Thomas' death in Arras, France, a casualty of the First World War.The story of Ed...

Presenting the desperate conflict of the First World War through the eyes of an ordinary German soldier, Ernst Jünger's Storm of Steel is translated by Michael Hofmann in Penguin Modern Classics.'As though walking through a deep dream, I saw steel helmets approaching through the craters. They seemed to sprout from the fire-harrowed soil like some iron harvest.'A memoir of astonishing power, savagery and ashen lyricism, Storm of Steel depicts Ernst Jünger's...

A brilliant new translation of Kafka’s best-known work, published for the 125th anniversary of his birthThis collection of new translations brings together the small proportion of Kafka’s works that he thought worthy of publication. It includes Metamorphosis, his most famous work, an exploration of horrific transformation and alienation; Meditation, a collection of his earlier studies; The Judgement, written in a single night of frenzied ...

A bracing and darkly comic novel about a disgraced priest who finds himself haunted by his dead and disapproving father, this little-known classic of Swiss literature is impossible to forget.In a small town in Switzerland, Franz—ex-clergyman, ex-husband, current counselor of locals at loose ends—is being haunted by his recently deceased father, Klement. In life, Franz was caught cheating on his wife and defrocked, after which Klement never spoke to him again. In de...

This collection of new translations brings together the small proportion of Kafka's works that he himself thought worthy of publication. It includes Metamorphosis, his most famous work, an exploration of horrific transformation and alienation; Meditation, a collection of his earlier studies; The Judgement, written in a single night of frenzied creativity; The Stoker, the first chapter of a novel set in America and a fascinating occasional piece, and ...

**“A potent, vaporous fever dream; a meditation on truth, lie, illusion, and time that floats like an aromatic haze through Herzog’s vivid reconstruction of Onoda’s war.” —The New York Times Book ReviewThe national bestseller by the great filmmaker Werner Herzog.**The great filmmaker Werner Herzog, in his first novel, tells the incredible story of Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese soldier who defended a small island in the Philippines for twenty-nine years after the ...

One of the great war memoirs, now featuring a foreword by the New York Times bestselling author of Matterhorn in time for the centenary of World War I and the Battle of the SommeA worldwide bestseller published shortly after the end of World War I, Storm of Steel is a memoir of astonishing power, savagery, and ashen lyricism. Itilluminates not only the horrors but also the fascination of total war, as seen through the eyes of an ordinary ...

Wolfgang Koeppen’s postwar masterpiece in a luminous new translation by the poet Michael HofmannPigeons on the Grass is told over a single day in Munich in 1948. The first new cinemas and insurance offices are opening atop the ruins, Korea and Persia are keeping the world in panic, planes rumble in the sky (but no one looks up), newspaper headlines announce war over oil and atomic bomb tests. Odysseus Cotton, a black man, alights at the station and hires a porter; ...

A novel about survival, self-reliance, and art, by Peter Stamm, finalist for the 2013 Man Booker International PrizeAll Days Are Night is the story of Gillian, a successful and beautiful TV host, content with her marriage to Matthias, even if she feels restless at times. One night following an argument, the couple has a terrible car accident: Matthias, who is drunk, hits a deer on the wet road and dies in the crash. Gillian wakes up in the hospital complet...

Following the publication of the widely acclaimed novel Seven Years comes a trove of stories from the Swiss master Peter Stamm. They all possess the traits that have built Stamm’s reputation: the directness of the prose, the deceptive surface simplicity of the narratives, and deep psychological insight into the existential dilemmas of contemporary life. Stamm does not waste a word, nor does he spare the reader’s feelings. These stories are a superb introduction to his work and a g...